1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system and method for providing interfaces between management models and system consoles. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system and method for providing national language support for management models that interface with one or more system consoles.
2. Description of the Related Art
There is an industry trend toward using standardized software engineering tools and techniques to represent the design of systems to manage real world objects. One such approach is using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and a derivative of UML called the Common Information Model (CIM). Using UML and CIM, developers can describe a computer information system that is not bound to a particular implementation or platform. CIM includes both a CIM Specification and a CIM Schema and UML is generally used to show the structure of the schemas.
The CIM Specification includes a language model, naming conventions, meta schema, and mapping techniques used to map the CIM data to other management models including SNMP, MIBs, DMTF, and MIFs. The CIM Schema includes a set of classes with associations that provide a well understood conceptual framework within which it is possible to organize the available information about the managed environment.
The CIM Schema includes three layers. First, the Core Schema includes an information model that captures notions that are applicable to all areas of management. Second, the Common Schema includes notions that are common to particular management areas but independent of a particular technology or implementation. There are generally five Common Schema areas: (1) systems, (2) applications, (3) networks, (4) devices, and (5) physical areas. The third CIM Schema layer is the Extension Schema area which includes technology specific extensions of the Common Schema. The Extension Schema area may be specific to a particular operating environment, such as a UNIX operating environment. The Extension Schema may further describe either a specific-general type of environment (i.e., an MS-Windows™ environment, a UNIX-90 environment, etc.), or a product specific operating environment (i.e., Windows 2000 Professional™, IBM AIX version 3.5, etc.).
While CIM includes notations and conventions that are widely agreed upon in industry, a CIM model does not provide information for product development because a CIM model is implementation independent, meaning that a common CIM model can be used as a design starting point to develop systems in a particular operating environment. A CIM model may be stored in a Managed Object Format (MOF) file, which is an ASCII file that includes a formal definition of the CIM Schema. The MOF is used as input to a MOF editor, parser, and compiler. CIM is produced by designers and developers to model a product. The CIM model is then used by others as input to management systems. However, the process of using a CIM model as input to management software is a resource intensive task. A challenge, therefore, with the prior art is the time and resources needed to design a system using CIM and write programs directed towards a particular operating environment.
CIM models are capable of including national language information within the CIM model in order to convey the model data to users with differing national languages. A challenge, however, is that the national language data is disbursed throughout the CIM model, making translation difficult. In the current art, a translation specialist scans through the CIM model (MOF) to identify translatable strings and adds translated strings within the MOF. A challenge of this approach is that it can cause CIM errors if the translator makes data entry errors. An additional challenge is the difficulty in finding and providing the translated strings within the MOF. These challenges may result in increased time and expense for translation, increased translation errors due to the need to scan the MOF, and increased chance for introducing coding errors in the MOF file by having one or more translators directly manipulate the MOF. What is needed, therefore, is a system and method to separate the translatable strings from the MOF.